Some people say that people don't like linking to PR 0 sites because they dont want their PR to go down since it drains their PR. But i don't think this theory is correct. Because that would mean forum sites always will have less PR than a normal content site, since forums have more out-links.

Can anyone verify?

Your PageRank will not drain as long as the website is SEO friendly and indexed by google.

Only reason I won't link to a PR0 website is if it's not indexed by google or it has bad SEO ethics.

With that said... if you have high PR you can be more selective with the links you choose to exchange. For example if you have a PR7 nobody is going to exchange w/ a PR0 when they can get a PR7, PR6, PR5, etc. in return.

PageRank doesn't;

leak, drain, bleed , dissipate, evaporate, leech or is otherwise reduced by out going links.

regardless of whether your site is SEO friendly or not.

Yeah, it had to be. Or Forum sites would never get much PR.
Good point bbott

It would defeat the point of PR.
PR is a judgment of how reliable your site is based on the rank and number of sites linking to you.
What would be the point of penalising sites for linking out?

I believe the amount of PR passed on has something to do with the amount of links on that page.
So if your sites has PR 6 and you have 1 outgoing link, that would be better for the site you are linking to than if you had 50 outgoing links.

Your PageRank will not drain as long as the website is SEO friendly and indexed by google.

PageRank doesn't;

leak, drain, bleed , dissipate, evaporate, leech or is otherwise reduced by out going links.

It would defeat the point of PR.
PR is a judgment of how reliable your site is based on the rank and number of sites linking to you.
What would be the point of penalising sites for linking out?

Hate to disagree with, well, Everyone. But I am pretty damm sure you are wrong.

PageRank has been around for a long time now and the basis of its calulation has been fairly well documented and admitted by google, for over at least a year now. I have seen no evidence to suggest the method of calculation has changed. The only thing that seems to have changed is the filter on what links pass PageRank.

The scoring system was designed at Leeds university to identify nodes in databases that were most regularly used (if I remember correctly). The basic principle is that all pages in the index are assigned a value of 1, on first calculation they take 85% of the value of each page and add it evenly between all the pages that it links to. So if you had two pages that just link to each other they would they would both end up with a value of 1.85 each, then this calculation is repeated multiple times. So if 100 pages all link to 'page A' and that 'page A' links to 'page B' on the first calculation 'page A' will end up with 86 and 'page B' with have 1.85, but after the second calculation 'page A' with have 171 and 'page B' will have been given a boast from 'page A's' new large PR, giving it now a value of 74.95. This calculation is then repeated multiple times.

This is all explained in far greater detail here: Page rank explained.

The point is, if you add a link from a high PR site to a low PR site the value of your site's pages will become lower - effectively draining PageRank. Now it's very hard to see because PageRank is updated so rarely, and there are so many other pages in the equation that it's not easy to tell what has made the effect. Plus we're only shown a small green bar which merely tells you roughly what range your PageRank falls into.

For example, look at this PageRank calculation with no outgoing links. HERE
The total pagerank of the site is: 6.600009

Now here is the exact same site structure plus one outgoing link. HERE
The total page rank is: 4.7308901

Because that would mean forum sites always will have less PR than a normal content site, since forums have more out-links

Forums have good PR for a number of reason; they do have a lot of outgoing links but they also have a ****load of internal links and they have a ****load of pages indexed, and since a begining value is assigned to each page, this can make a big difference.

Take, for example, this forum as it has 132,000 indexed pages all of which link to the homepage giving it a PR of 6. That makes perfect sense.

Originally Posted by nixies78@yahoo.

Hate to disagree with, well, Everyone. But I am pretty damm sure you are wrong.

PageRank has been around for a long time now and the basis of its calulation has been fairly well documented and admitted by google, for over at least a year now. I have seen no evidence to suggest the method of calculation has changed. The only thing that seems to have changed is the filter on what links pass PageRank.

The scoring system was designed at Leeds university to identify nodes in databases that were most regularly used (if I remember correctly). The basic principle is that all pages in the index are assigned a value of 1, on first calculation they take 85% of the value of each page and add it evenly between all the pages that it links to. So if you had two pages that just link to each other they would they would both end up with a value of 1.85 each, then this calculation is repeated multiple times. So if 100 pages all link to 'page A' and that 'page A' links to 'page B' on the first calculation 'page A' will end up with 86 and 'page B' with have 1.85, but after the second calculation 'page A' with have 171 and 'page B' will have been given a boast from 'page A's' new large PR, giving it now a value of 74.95. This calculation is then repeated multiple times.

This is all explained in far greater detail here: Page rank explained.

The point is, if you add a link from a high PR site to a low PR site the value of your site's pages will become lower - effectively draining PageRank. Now it's very hard to see because PageRank is updated so rarely, and there are so many other pages in the equation that it's not easy to tell what has made the effect. Plus we're only shown a small green bar which merely tells you roughly what range your PageRank falls into.

For example, look at this PageRank calculation with no outgoing links. HERE
The total pagerank of the site is: 6.600009

Now here is the exact same site structure plus one outgoing link. HERE
The total page rank is: 4.7308901



Forums have good PR for a number of reason; they do have a lot of outgoing links but they also have a ****load of internal links and they have a ****load of pages indexed, and since a begining value is assigned to each page, this can make a big difference.

Take, for example, this forum as it has 132,000 indexed pages all of which link to the homepage giving it a PR of 6. That makes perfect sense.

Having two pages with the same page structure has nothing to do with PageRank... it all depends on how many incoming links that page has - that is all.

The only downside of putting a lot of outgoing links on your webpage is that it will drain your "Passable Page Rank Power" because it's splitting up with so many sites. For example, if you had two exact sites w/ the same exact incoming links, if one of these sites had 20 outgoing links and one had only 1 outgoing link. More pagerank would be passed onto the 1 link tahn would be to the 20 sites.

This is why I stay away from sites who have too many outgoing links on their page. There is no point in exchanging links w/ them for PR purposes.... If you ever buy link make sure they have a MAXIMUM of 10 outgoing links otherwise don't waste your money.

Originally Posted by nixies78@yahoo.

The scoring system was designed at Leeds university...

I think Sergey Brin and Larry Page might disagree.

Ok, i dont get the PR calculator couldnt figure it out.
But according to you guys you're saying that:
if there was a link directory
with lets say 1000 OUTgoing links.
if i add my sites like to it it becomes: 1001... And you're saying that the link directories PR will not go down, but the effect of me getting higher PR is less than that of a directory with 100 outgoing links.

So it never drains the PR of the website having the links, it only drains the amount of PR the outgoing linked websites will get from your websites PR.

But now that i think about it... look at it this way then. What if everyone just linked each other... then it would just be harder to get PR, or everyone would have a high PR at first.

Well done nixies78@yahoo, it's a while since I read so much incorrect information in one place.

to execute; Both points are correct

look at it this way then. What if everyone just linked each other... then it would just be harder to get PR, or everyone would have a high PR at first

Hypothetically, if every page was cross-linked to every page this would create a closed feedback loop and the value of every page would be unity.
This means that whatever value was initially in the system would be shared equally by all nodes. However because of the dampening factor this cannot occur with the PR system.

Well done nixies78@yahoo, it's a while since I read so much incorrect information in one place.

to execute; Both points are correct

Okay to start with chrishirst, please don't just say: "it's a while since I read so much incorrect information in one place", because I disagree with you, then give no points. I have cited references where I can find them and I have tried my best to describe my points. Don't just stick your fingers in your ears and go "I'm right, your wrong, la la la". If I am wrong please explain, (evidence and sources are greatly appericated). I will admit if I have got it wrong.

Hypothetically, if every page was cross-linked to every page this would create a closed feedback loop and the value of every page would be unity.
This means that whatever value was initially in the system would be shared equally by all nodes. However because of the dampening factor this cannot occur with the PR system.

Yes this would create a feedback loop, but that is not a problem, since the loop has a set amount of Iterations this is fine.

The point if all pages would link to each other in a system is also fine, their are very few site that do that. I don't think I have ever seen any exspecaily because google find site though inbound links so a closed system would not be indexed.

What do you mean by because of the damping factor? I can't make any sense of that sentence.

I don't understand any of the point you are making here and can't understand how they discredit my pervious suggestions.

Having two pages with the same page structure has nothing to do with PageRank... it all depends on how many incoming links that page has - that is all.

Bbott, You are missing the point here, it is not about the structure of the actual page, it is about site structure how the pages of the site interconnect. This does have a effect.

So it never drains the PR of the website having the links, it only drains the amount of PR the outgoing linked websites will get from your websites PR.

No if a directory add a link to your website they are giving you a little of their page rank. Yes it does drain the Page rank of the directory and slightly increase yours. This is why directories and website use javascript and redirects to pervent the pagerank getting drained from their site.

Originally Posted by nixies78@yahoo.

Yes it does drain the Page rank of the directory...

Pagerank is an evaluation of the 'importance' of a web page, using the number and value of incoming links. The equation for calculating pagerank for a particular web page uses only inbound links. Outbound links from this page are disregarded when calculating its pagerank, so there will be no 'leakage' of pagerank.

Search for Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page to get the definitive equation. They developed the pagerank concept at Stanford University I believe.

Pagerank is an evaluation of the 'importance' of a web page, using the number and value of incoming links. The equation for calculating pagerank for a particular web page uses only inbound links. Outbound links from this page are disregarded when calculating its pagerank, so there will be no 'leakage' of pagerank.

Search for Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page to get the definitive equation. They developed the pagerank concept at Stanford University I believe.

I agree. Could well be stanford University, I was a long time ago I was told about this and I can't find any resources on that.

Can I define what I mean by 'drain'. Page rank is calulated as you we have been saying here but do a calulation by assigning a value then adding a percentage of the evenly between the pages it links to. This calulation is done a number of times to generate a PR rank value which is then displayed via the little green bar, depending on which grouping the value fall into 0-10.

Now if you add a extra link from your site out to another and everything else stays the same. The next time the calulation is done, you will have a low value than you did the pervious time. That is for all intensive purpose appear to be a 'drained' even though their has never been a minus in the equation at all.

It is only dependant on inbound links. However since the inbound links determine the value that inbound links may give you in the future interation of the calulation, i.e. if you give Page rank to a page which gives you page rank back you will get back more page rank than if you give to a page which does not link back to you.

Originally Posted by nixies78@yahoo.

Now if you add a extra link from your site out to another and everything else stays the same. The next time the calulation is done, you will have a low value than you did the pervious time.

I'm not sure why you think this. If everything else stays the same, each of the sites you link to will experience a dilution of the pagerank that they originally received from you. I'm not sure why you think your PR will go down, though.

ok where shall we start

PageRank has been around for a long time now and the basis of its calulation has been fairly well documented and admitted by google, for over at least a year now

actually well over 6 years now.

The scoring system was designed at Leeds university

Nope Stanford University (as others have pointed out)

The basic principle is that all pages in the index are assigned a value of 1

it's a NULL value until the page is indexed then it will be 0

What do you mean by because of the damping factor? I can't make any sense of that sentence

You are obviously missing some facts then having not seen the original PR calculation and documents for Google.
Please Note: There is NO mention of a minus value for outgoing links!!!

This is why directories and website use javascript and redirects to pervent the pagerank getting drained from their site.

Nope, redirects are often used to track the link click counts, only the ones who think they can hoard PR use it for that

At the end of the day PR as shown on the toolbar is of NO use for gaining useful convertable rankings. For that a few links with the right anchor text will outweigh hundreds of URL only or sitename links.

Okay for a breakdown lets start with the nit picking ones at the beginning and get them out the way:

Quote:
PageRank has been around for a long time now and the basis of its calulation has been fairly well documented and admitted by google, for over at least a year now
actually well over 6 years now.

This point we agree on, 6 years is over 1 year, If maths server me right. This does not really class a incorrect information.

Quote:
The scoring system was designed at Leeds university
Nope Stanford University (as others have pointed out)

Can’t disagree with you their but, you may like to note that in my first post I suffixed that statement with:

(if I remember correctly)

Because I wasn’t sure, my memory was rather patchy their.

Onto your next point:

Nope, redirects are often used to track the link click counts, only the ones who think they can hoard PR use it for that

Well maybe they are occasionally used to track link counts, but I think it is much more common that it is used to not loose PR. That is why Vilesilencer directory lists sorts the directory by the type of links used.

An example of an unfriendly dynamic link that uses ID's is:

<a class="category_links" target="_blank" href="http://directory.bizhat.com/cgi-bin/jump.cgi?ID=1073">Info Places Directory</a>

For SEO purposes these links are useless. They will not increase your ranking at all. The links are useless for anything but traffic.

Also if using JavaScript to block loosing Page rank wasn't a big problem, why would automatic rec link directory gone to the effort of having functions built in to check for it?

For example:

Reciprocal Manager can be set to check for JavaScript redirection cheating. This is useful to ensure that the link partners URL does not employ JavaScript redirection to attempt to fool link validators. Basically, some people will use JavaScript to make it seem like your link is on their site when it really is not. Reciprocal Manager will help prevent that from happening to you!

Right now we have that out the way onto the actual equation.

Please Note: There is NO mention of a minus value for outgoing links!!!

This is the main point that I seem to be having trouble getting across. Let me use your own evidence to prove my point.

Each time the calculation for page rank is done it is generate from scratch all page starting with a value of 1. Now for a page to appear to be ‘drained’ of page rank all it needs is for when the calculation is redone the Value is less that what it was in the pervious calculation. Their does not need to be a minus in the equation anywhere, outgoing links do not need to reduce the value all they need to do is send their bonus to different pages, in this case by adding an extra link out of your site you would be sending the value to other website rather than keeping it on your own.

As I tried to say here:

Can I define what I mean by 'drain'. Page rank is calculated as you we have been saying here but do a calculation by assigning a value then adding a percentage of the evenly between the pages it links to. This calculation is done a number of times to generate a PR rank value which is then displayed via the little green bar, depending on which grouping the value fall into 0-10.
…
That is for all intensive purpose appear to be a 'drained' even though their has never been a minus in the equation at all.

Quote:
The basic principle is that all pages in the index are assigned a value of 1
it's a NULL value until the page is indexed then it will be 0

This is another point I have tried to address, seemingly unsuccessfully. The green bar which you see that is 0-10 is only a indication of what group your actual page rank value fall into. This is clear from the page rank calculation.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

You can’t do this equation and keep between 0-10. It is clear that the green bar is just a indication of what range you fall into, Especially when the equation is done n times each time adding a positive value. And this is where the primary value is assigned:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

The assigning of value 1 for each page. If you did not assign this value to each page the equation would always give you the answer of 0.

Or as PhilC better Described it:

First, let me explain in more detail why the values shown in the Google toolbar are not the actual PageRank figures. According to the equation, and to the creators of Google, the billions of pages on the web average out to a PageRank of 1.0 per page. So the total PageRank on the web is equal to the number of pages on the web * 1, which equals a lot of PageRank spread around the web.
The Google toolbar range is from 1 to 10. (They sometimes show 0, but that figure isn't believed to be a PageRank calculation result). What Google does is divide the full range of actual PageRanks on the web into 10 parts - each part is represented by a value as shown in the toolbar. So the toolbar values only show what part of the overall range a page's PageRank is in, and not the actual PageRank itself. The numbers in the toolbar are just labels.

At the end of the day PR as shown on the toolbar is of NO use for gaining useful convertable rankings.

The discussion here was not about getting convertible ranking, it was about whether outgoing links ‘drain’ page rank. This is a different discussion. One that is much more complicated and has a lot less solid information available. Personally I believe that pagerank is still a main part of the google algorithm, even though there are a lot more factor involved.

Just saying it is ‘NO use’, seems a overreaction that you don’t have enough information to validate.

As the equation for calculating the pagerank of your web page is purely a function of incoming links, please explain how increasing/decreasing the number of outgoing links on your page will change your pagerank.

Sure. The key to it is the point that the calculation is repeated a set amount of times.

EXAMPLE 1
This is a diagram of a simplified version of what I was talking about earlier. The two pages we are concerned with are A and B (pages are black squares and link are arrows, the value is what value PR the page has at the beginning of that iteration, the + about the arrow are how much the value the link is adding to the page it links to) For example say A is your homepage and B is a second page in your website. I have added in four pages that are linking to the page A that could be consider links form other websites. In this example all pages only have one link.

So these are the figures for the first calculation: As you can see each page starts with a value of 1 then it’s value will be add divided equally between the each link it has so because every page only has one link, they all add 0.85 at first.





Now the second time the calculation is done the value look like this:




So you can see here that page A is going to have the most Page rank, now the page rank that it is giving to Page B it is getting back as more calculations are being done. Now this would be carried out a number of times.

EXAMPLE 2
Now look at the same equation but I will add one outgoing link from Page A. Note how now the value that page A adds to it linking pages is split evenly between the two pages it links to, so rather than 0.85 it gives each page half that 0.425. Like this:





Now see what happens after one iteration of the calculation:




Now you can see from the example that Page A is only going to get 1.21125 on the next calculation. However in the example 1 it would have got back 1.5725 and as more interations of the calculation go on the bigger the difference would be.

So even thought the value is calculated purely by incoming links the way the structure is made up can greatly vary what page has what page rank.

PageRank is not and has never been a major part of the ranking algo. The anchor text was and still is the major part.

Actually your example of a tracking link could certainly pass linkpop value on depending on the type of redirect used. A 302 will not but a 301 would.

So gaining useful traffic is not part of SEO

For SEO purposes these links are useless. They will not increase your ranking at all. The links are useless for anything but traffic.

This is probably the most stupid thing I've heard. SEO is ALL about gaining useful traffic. Far too many "SEOs" go about gaining top rankings for totally useless or "willy waving" words and phrases.
Sales and conversions are the only thing worth mentioning. What is the point of being No1 in the SERPs if nobody actually clicks through to your site?

outgoing links do not need to reduce the value all they need to do is send their bonus to different pages, in this case by adding an extra link out of your site you would be sending the value to other website rather than keeping it on your own.

NO NO NO NO NO! The calculation is for incoming links to page A. the outgoing links on page A are not factored into the calculations so they cannot have even the slightest effect on the value.

If this were the case every page on every directory that exists on the Internet would have a PR of 0.
The real value of the PR of any given page is continually changing up and down as new pages are found and added to the index and other pages drop out off the index. But the PR value of any page is NOT reduced by outgoing links, all that happens is the amount bestowed to each of the linked pages is reduced.